The Service Availability (SA) Forum has developed standard interfaces to enable the delivery of highly available carrier-grade systems with off-the-shelf platforms, middleware and service applications. Implementation of the standards allows software developers to focus on the application code that provides mission-critical services, and to minimize the need for customized high availability programming.
FIG. 1 is a conceptual architecture stack defined by the SA forum for a highly available (HA) system. The SA forum has developed the Application Interface Specification (AIS) 120 to provide a standardized interface between HA applications 110 and HA middleware 130, thereby making them independent of one another. The HA applications 110 and the HA middleware 130 are run on an operating system 140 and hosted by a hardware platform 150. Service continuity is achieved only with the cooperation of all of the components in the stack. A description of the standards developed by the SA forum can be found in Service Availability Forum: Overview. SAI-Overview-B.05.03, February 2010.
The SA forum has also standardized platform management as part of the AIS 120. The Platform Management (PLM) service 125 manages platform entities in an HA system. A specification for the PLM service 125 is described in Service Availability Forum: AIS Platform Management Service, SAI-AIS-PLM-A.01.02, November 2009. Platform entities include hardware elements (HEs) and system software entities. These system software entities are referred to as “execution environments (EEs),” which include operating systems (OSes), virtual machines (VMs) and virtual machine monitors (VMMs) (also known as hypervisors). Platform entities are represented in an information model as managed objects, which are organized into a tree structure. The tree structure of the information model implies the naming of and dependencies among the represented entities.
The information model serves as an administrative interface between system administration and platform entities. Through the information model, system administration can configure platform entities and obtain runtime status of the configured platform. System administration can also issue administrative operations on the managed objects to exercise administrative control of the represented platform entities.